Controversy Over PokerStars 70 Billionth Hand

Monday, November 7th, 2011 by Ryan

We just wouldn’t be talking about online poker if there wasn’t some sort of controversy or scandal surrounding it. This story stays true as we talk about the 70 billionth hand in the PokerStars “100 Billion Celebration”. The idea behind this promotion is that there are different bonuses for different milestones for hands that are dealt out all the way to the 100 billionth hand. Recently, the promotion was nearing its 70 billionth hand, which featured an incredible amount of players sitting at tables attempting to win the grand prize of $70,000 for winning the 70 billionth hand ever dealt at the online poker site.

The 70 billionth hand was dealt out to two players who were playing a heads up match at the $0.25/$0.50 limits, but it was interesting as the how they played leading up to the big time hand. The two players decided to soft fold their hands for fifteen minutes straight before the milestone hand was dealt. Soft folding is essentially when players just fold their hands instantly as soon as they are dealt to them in the small blind, and the blinds automatically go to the big blind at that point. The reason why these two players decided to do this, is that they were able to see a new hand every three seconds, and this obviously gave them a much better chance to be able to be a part of the 70 billionth hand when it was dealt out.

The 70 billionth hand was finally dealt out, and it went to the two players who were at this table, who play under the names “BeatUrOut” and “koenigskeba”. When the hand came, the two went all in (because you have to win the hand in order to get the $70,000 grand prize), and koenigskeba’s Ace-Jack off suit beat out the King-Five suited of BeatUrOut. This meant that both players got a nice bonus, but koenigskeba got the $70k prize. There were quite a few questions surrounding the situation, as many people felt that it wasn’t fair for the two players to do this in order to give them a chance to be a part of the milestone hand. In the end though, PokerStars looked into it, and said that while it is not the “spirit of the promotion”, that it is still allowed, and that there is no where in the rules that states that players cannot do it. They also answered the question of whether or not it would be allowed in upcoming promotions, by saying that they were currently looking into it and would make a decision.

What is so incredible about this situation is that it was actually shown that if the two players had multi-tabled the max number of tables that PokerStars allows (24 tables), that they would have played approximately 28,800 hands over the span of a single hour. On top of that though, there would be absolutely no rake contributed to the site, because PokerStars does not take any rake if there’s no flop seen by the players.

Of course many other players were upset by the situation, and continually made a push to get PokerStars to revoke the prize and distribute it in another fashion to players on the site. In the end though, the prize remains with these two players, and it will be interesting to see how the upcoming milestone hands are handled.